How Nutrient-Poor Soil Could Be Affecting Your Sleep, Digestion & More

If you're up to speed on nutrition news, you've probably heard talk that large-scale, industrial agriculture can deplete crops of essential vitamins and minerals that our bodies need to thrive. But why, exactly, does that happen, and what can be done about it?

In its natural state, soil is full of invisible but indispensable microbes. Like, really full of them. There are more microorganisms in a handful of healthy soil than humans who have ever lived, and the microbes on our planet outnumber the stars in our universe more than a million times over.

"The problem is that most conventional agriculture practices erode the organic matter and life in the soil," Ryland Engelhart, co-founder and executive director of Kiss the Ground, a nonprofit that proposes a new way of farming, tells mbg.

Take tillers: those giant machines that look right at home on a large, open pasture. They break up the soil in preparation for the planting season, but in doing so they often disrupt underground microbial systems. Farms that use conventional tools like these typically have 60% less biomass from soil microorganisms1 than ones that are managed with soil health in mind.

As such, our farms are producing food that isn't as nutrient-rich as it could be. "We are destroying the ability of the soil to provide nutrition to the plant," Mark Hyman, M.D., said on a visit on the mindbodygreen podcast. The functional medicine doctor estimated that the nutrient density of plant foods is 50% less than it was 50 years ago, thanks to the invasive way we've been farming.

Regenerative agriculture, a type of farming that seeks to improve soil health, is one promising solution to this nutrient-density dilemma, as well as other major global issues like climate change. (Healthy soil has the capacity to absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the ground.)

"Feeding soil life to encourage biodiversity and abundance means managing the farm so that there are living roots in the ground for as much of the year as possible," reads a recent report by The Rodale Institute, a nonprofit that conducts farming research. To do so, regenerative agriculture uses methods like cover cropping, crop rotation, and reduced tillage to keep soil microbe communities intact.

A global transition over to regenerative farming is underway, but it's going slower than most nutritionists and environmentalists would like (though there are a few ways we can all get involved in speeding it up). In the meantime, experts are saying we should be extra diligent about getting the nutrients that are being farmed out of our food—one of the most important being magnesium.

"In the modern diet, our magnesium intake is low," says nutritionist and magnesium researcher Andrea Rosanoff, Ph.D. "And we have been a bit low generationally—our mothers were low, and our mothers before that."